Chapter 9.
Technology Communication, Community, and Couchsurfing CASEY Fenton was going to Iceland. He wanted a local, Reykjavikian sort of travel adventure while he was there, so he began hunting through the University of Iceland student directory, pulling out every email that he could find.1 Fenton fired off more than a thousand messages. "Hi, I"m coming to Iceland next week," the emails read. "It would be nice to hang out. What can we do?"
Fenton ultimately got back between fifty to a hundred responses, and he decided to hang out with an Icelandic woman named Johanna. "She had been on the cover of an Icelandic tabloid, and I thought: Fascinating. When else am I going to hang out with a controversial Icelandic socialite?" Fenton told me. Johanna gave Fenton an insider"s tour of Iceland. They went drinking with Johanna"s friends. Fenton visited Johanna"s family, who lived near the ocean, and when he left the country a few days later, he thought to himself: This is how I"ll have to travel all the time.
After Fenton returned home, he realized that others wanted to have similar travel adventures, and a few years later, he started a website called Couchsurfing. The idea behind the site was straightforward-locals who have an empty bed or couch offer it to visitors who are looking for a place to stay. When the site first went up, the typical user was what you might imagine: a twenty-five-year-old trekking through Bangkok, hunting for a place to stash his backpack and drink red wine in a coffee mug.
But over the past few years, the site has dramatically expanded its audience, and today it might be one of the world"s most successful travel networks. There are more than six million members, some twenty million dollars in venture capital funding, and listings on the site include everything from a Bedouin cave in Jordan to an oceanside apartment in Portugal. "We"re trying to build the feeling that the world is larger than you think, that it"s safer than you think, that it cares about more than you think," Fenton told me.
I first came across Fenton and the connection between trust and Couchsurfing in the excellent book What"s Mine Is Yours by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers. In their book, Botsman and Rogers detail the rise of what they call "collaborative consumption," and they argue that sites like Couchsurfing can work "to bind us together." For Botsman and Rogers, collaborative consumption sites like Airbnb, Zipcar, and Freecycle build an important type of social capital because they help connect people who might not otherwise be bonded. (Yochai Benkler also discusses Couchsurfing in his work. But it was the New Yorker that might have had the most entertaining discussion of the website. The headline of the New Yorker article? "You"re Welcome.") I wanted to know more about Couchsurfing and how it might improve our faith in others, and so when I traveled to Roanoke, Virginia, recently, I used the site to connect with Andres Moctezuma. He lived just outside of downtown Roanoke in a sprawling house with a hot tub, five bedrooms, and an exercise room complete with free weights and motivational posters. On the site, Moctezuma described himself as a "half-Mexican half-Polish guy with extraordinary good luck." His personality, he added, was a bit like a dog"s, "the ones that run free and don"t come when they are called." When I told my wife about my plans, she gave me a quizzical look that said: Really?
But my evening with Moctezuma in Roanoke had the genial feeling of meeting a distant cousin for the first time. He took me for drinks at a local Cuban restaurant. We talked about how Moctezuma once surfed the waves in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. He told me about the time that he practiced aikido in a dojo in Tokyo. Moctezuma has used Couchsurfing dozens of times, staying at other people"s houses as well as hosting. His worst experience? The time that a mother and daughter stayed at his house, and while he was at work, the women reorganized all of his dishes. "They were trying to be nice, but it was a little weird," he told me. "I remember not being able to find my bowls for a while."
If that"s a bad experience, it"s not all that bad, and most surfers have positive interactions. Crime is relatively rare, and as many as 18 percent of surfers reciprocate an exchange, which suggests that the interaction went well enough for people to want to see each other again.2 In other words, people are living up to Fenton"s expectation that the world is much safer than you think, that it cares about you much more than you think.
That certainly was the experience of Edward Chu. He had used Couchsurfing a few times before he arrived in New York City"s Penn Station a few years ago. The bus ride from Lexington, Virginia, had taken Chu nine hours, and when he stepped onto the streets of Manhattan, it was like entering an arcade game. Everything seemed bright and shimmery. At the time, Chu was in his second year at the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute. The school was a good fit for him. He loved the deep traditions (first-year students at the school are called "rats") and the self-discipline (telephone use on campus is limited).
Chu was on Thanksgiving break, and during his trip to New York City, he planned to stay a few nights at the apartment of Bob Redmond.3 Chu had met Redmond through Couchsurfing, and typically users will check the profile of the host before they visit to gain a sense of the person"s reputation. But Chu had been in a rush that morning, and he never got a chance to glance at Redmond"s profile.
Finally, sometime around midnight, Chu arrived at the building, rode the elevator to the sixth floor, and then knocked on Redmond"s door. A moment pa.s.sed and the door was pulled open, and today Chu can"t quite remember what happened next. Did he step inside? Did he drop his bags? The one thing that Chu can remember is that Redmond was naked.
Chu recalls feeling a sort of shock. His face blanched. He put his arm over his eyes. "Oh no," he said. "Oh no."
"You didn"t check my profile, did you?" Redmond asked.
The two men stood awkwardly in the hallway while Redmond explained that he was a nudist, that he had not worn clothes at home for decades.
"I felt a little better after I met his roommates," all of whom wore clothes, Chu told me later. "But yeah, it was pretty weird." Yet for all the weirdness, Chu stayed at Redmond"s apartment for a few nights. During the day, Chu would visit tourist sites. At night, he would have dinner with Redmond and some of Redmond"s friends. One night, filet mignon; another night, turkey. It turned out that they both loved Broadway shows and traveling. Redmond asked Chu about what it was like to attend a military school, while Chu became comfortable with Redmond"s nudism. "I would find it weird if Bob had clothes on now," Chu told me.
The two men became friends of a sort, and when Chu came to New York City two years later, he again stayed at Redmond"s apartment. One Sat.u.r.day morning during that second visit, I joined them for brunch. Redmond was, of course, naked. It was easy to spot his favorite chair, too: He kept a towel over the top of the seat to keep it clean. We talked about Couchsurfing and military academies and what it was like to answer the door naked.
The two men were, without question, an odd pair. One was a middle-aged gay nudist; the other, a twentysomething military student. But they laughed and joked and talked about an off-Broadway show that they had seen together. They weren"t the closest of buddies. But they had developed a type of bond. Or as Chu told me, "I didn"t think this would happen, but I"d say that Bob is one of my friends."
It might be hard to believe that technology can promote trust. An iPad is supposed to foster isolation. People believe that Facebook makes us lonely. But it turns out that technology can kick-start our cooperative ways. One way to understand this idea is to start with some phone calls that came into the BMW service desk some years ago. The German car company had put in a new GPS system that spoke to drivers in a female voice, and a short time later, men started calling the car company and complaining. Clifford Na.s.s served as a consultant to BMW at the time, and in his book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, he recounts a typical exchange between the drivers and the BMW customer service operators: Customer: I can"t use my navigation system.
Operator: I"m very sorry about that, sir. What seems to be the problem?
Customer: A woman should not be giving directions.
Operator: Sir, it is not really a woman. It is only a recorded voice.
Customer: I don"t trust directions from a woman.
Operator: Sir, if it makes you feel better, I am certain that the engineers that built the system and the cartographers who figured out the directions were all men.
Customer: It doesn"t matter. It simply doesn"t work.4 Because of the spate of calls, BMW ultimately recalled the device, and the reason was obvious: The male drivers didn"t like women telling them what to do. This incident goes beyond the narrow-mindedness of well-heeled drivers, and the anecdote underscores the fact that our brains interact with technology in much the same way that they interact with individuals. Our brains often view devices as social beings, and if you are the type of man who doesn"t think that a woman should be giving you directions, then you don"t want a woman"s voice giving you directions.
Why does this happen? Well, we"re social machines, and our brains weren"t built to distinguish between a person and a piece of technology that acts like a person. "For almost all of human history, if something acted like a human, sounded like a human, it was a human," Na.s.s told me. "Our brains did not evolve for anything else."
In one study, Na.s.s asked users to give feedback on a software package.5 The first group used the software package on one computer and then answered questions about its performance on the same computer. The second group used the same software but responded to questions on a different computer. It turned out that the people who both tested and reviewed the software on the same computer gave the software better ratings. The explanation is simple, according to Na.s.s. The subjects tried to protect the computer"s feelings; they didn"t want to tell the device that it had presented them with bad software.
Part of the issue is that the physical world and our mental representations of it are deeply connected, and within our brains, fiction isn"t all that fictional. Imagination isn"t all that imaginative. When I called Na.s.s for an interview, he was in Palo Alto, California, and he pointed out that my brain had probably created a mental image of him, making it seem like we were talking face-to-face even though he was some three thousand miles away.
Paul Zak has also done informal experiments that help us better understand this idea, and it turns out that when people log in to a social network and interact with close friends, their oxytocin increases. Zak conducted the first of these studies with journalist Adam Penenberg, and in his accompanying Fast Company article, Penenberg argues that the results suggest that "online relationships can be just as real as those conducted offline."6 This notion fascinated me, and when I visited Zak at his home, I asked the neuroscientist to give me the same experiment that he had given Penenberg. So Zak took my blood. I spent some ten minutes on Facebook. And then Zak took my blood again. The results were the same as Penenberg"s: After I messaged friends and posted pictures of my daughter, my trust hormone jumped up. It was, as Zak argues, like the virtual world wasn"t really all that virtual, as if the picture of my daughter wasn"t all that different than seeing her in person.
I"d argue that one of the reasons that we have such a negative view of technology goes back to the television. In Bowling Alone, for instance, Robert Putnam suggests that TV has gone a long way to corrupt our sense of togetherness. He points out that television watchers are less engaged, less friendly, even less happy, and Putnam argues that as much as 15 percent of civic apathy lies at the feet of what he calls the TV generation. Putnam might be right. But what"s crucial-and perhaps too obvious to point out-is that the Internet is fundamentally different from television. Or look at something like Couchsurfing: There"s simply no way that your old Panasonic could have created that type of experience. It wouldn"t have made the personal connection. It couldn"t have supported the level of communication.
Of course, what makes the Internet different-and more powerful-does not always make us more trusting, and certainly some of our technology usage can make us more isolated. Part of the issue is that a lot of the screen time is plainly mindless. When I recently a.n.a.lyzed a federal database, I found that kids in school generally don"t use digital devices for high-end interactive programs like simulations.7 Instead, they"re honing basic skills, and more than a third of middle school math students regularly use a computer for drill and practice. In contrast, only 24 percent of middle school students regularly use spreadsheets for math a.s.signments. In high schools, I uncovered a similar trend, and an overwhelming proportion of students reported regularly watching a movie or video in science cla.s.s, while well under half said they"ve had "hands-on experience with simple machines."
The Internet doesn"t always make us more honest either, and the Web allows people to be anonymous, hidden. Or as the cla.s.sic New Yorker cartoon notes: "On the Internet, no one knows you"re a dog." Sometimes this promotes transparency. But just as often it makes it harder to figure out if your partner is trustworthy. For their part, smart tech companies understand the limitations of technology, and they take steps to encourage face-to-face interaction, with some, like the peer-to-peer lending firm Zilok, requiring people to meet in person before they exchange services. "This is actually quite important," Zilok cofounder Gary Cige told me. "Because you are actually less likely to screw someone that you"ve already met and will meet again."
The bottom line is that the principles of trust don"t change when it comes to technology. Reciprocity will always be a way to build our faith in others. Connectedness will always matter, and when we use technology in thoughtful ways, it can sometimes be easier for these principles to take hold.
When technology works for us, it does more than build new opportunities for communication. It can also build vast networks and information systems. It can create communities and social movements. It can even personalize something as impersonal as your microwave. But there"s a problem with technology, as security expert Bruce Schneier argues: Technology helps both the world"s saints and its sinners.
Take, for instance, the story of Robert Morris. On November 2, 1988, he was sitting in front of a computer at Cornell University. He was a first-year computer science grad student with s.h.a.ggy hair and Andy Warholstyle gla.s.ses.8 For the previous few weeks, Morris had been tinkering with a program designed to reveal some of the security holes in an early computer network called Arpanet. The Department of Defense had built Arpanet as a way to connect computers to each other, and the network eventually evolved into what we know today as the Internet. Back then, though, Arpanet was still fairly new, linking around sixty thousand computers in research facilities and military bases around the country.
Robert Morris knew computers well, as Katie Hafner and John Markoff describe in their book Cyberpunk. As an undergrad, Morris had become a bit of a computer science legend at Harvard, and even before graduate school, he had given speeches on computer safety at the National Security Agency. Soon after Morris arrived at Cornell, he became curious about just how large and interconnected Arpanet had become. So over the course of a few weeks, Morris created a few lines of code that would burrow through the network. "My purpose was to write a program that would spread as widely as possible," he later explained.9 Morris released his computer program into the Arpanet system at around 7:30 on that November evening, and when he came back after dinner, he couldn"t get into his computer. The machine was down. Morris soon figured out what had gone wrong: His code was replicating far faster than he had thought possible. When Morris built the program, he a.s.sumed that it would move across the network slowly. But the code was rushing through Arpanet, clogging the network, flooding computers, and crashing systems. "I was scared; it seemed like the worm was going out of control," he later explained.10 Morris managed to have an anonymous message sent out that night, detailing how network managers could potentially stop the program. But it was too late. The network had already been pushed over its limit, and around 10 percent of all Arpanet-linked computers became infected. In some places, Morris"s computer program destroyed entire networks, and the Army Ballistics Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland, had to shutter its laboratories for almost a week. "It was like the Sorcerer"s Apprentice," one researcher later explained.11 Morris had unleashed the world"s first computer worm. A computer worm is different from a computer virus. A virus needs a program or application to function, and viruses usually require someone to do something in order to infect a computer. But a worm can travel across computers without anyone"s help, and a worm"s ability to propagate itself across a network underscores a paradox that"s at the heart of technology: The more connected we are, the more vulnerable we are. Take Arpanet again. The network of computers blazed the way for Skype and Tumblr and Etsy. But it also made each device within the system more vulnerable to attack, and so a mild-mannered grad student was able to bring down the research arm of an army base.
This all works to make security a never-ending sort of struggle, as Schneier and many others have argued. It"s an endless compet.i.tion. I recently spoke to security expert Brian Chess. He serves as the vice president of security and infrastructure at a technology firm, and he"s constantly uncovering new attacks on the company"s software. Hackers will invent a new virus or expose a new operating system loophole, and Chess will have to create a program that stops the attack.
But the hackers will soon come up with a more sophisticated invasion, and so Chess has to develop a more sophisticated defense. This continues, he told me, more or less every day. "We put a defensive system in place. The bad guys look at that and then they come back at that," he told me. "We just walk up the ladder together."
Schneier argues that societies reach a sort of equilibrium between what he calls the doves (the people who protect security systems) and the hawks (the people who break into security systems). The problem is that technology disrupts the balance-and often gives an initial advantage to the hawks. "The marginal, the unorganized, they incorporate new technology a lot faster than the inst.i.tutional," Schneier told me.
The doves face other problems, as Schneier points out, and too much security can crowd out our social side. It can make us less trusting. Plus, security tends to push out nuance. Take the Robert Morris case again. A jury eventually found the graduate student guilty of hacking, and a judge sentenced him to three years of probation and a $10,000 fine, which is nearly the same punishment a man received a few years later for s.e.xually abusing a ten-year-old.12 Schneier has long argued that "security is a process," and he"s absolutely right. We"re always walking up the security ladder together, as Brian Chess told me, and technology highlights this balancing act. What"s striking, I think, is that social trust isn"t all that different. It"s also a process, something that develops over time, something that we grow and create, a manifestation of our social capital. What Schneier suggests is that technology just underscores the notion that trust of any sort can"t be guaranteed. We can take solace in the fact that when we trust, we"re typically rewarded with more trust. We can take solace in the fact that people are generally trustworthy. But trust is also risk, and without that risk, cooperation wouldn"t be cooperation. It would be subservience.
Chapter 10.
Path Forward Sometimes We Need to Leap HEIGHTS have put me in a panic for as long as I can remember. I hate balcony seating. I don"t like looking at tall buildings. A ride on an escalator can send me into a roar of shivers. I"m not against a little thrill-seeking. I"ve owned motorcycles. I"ve raced cars. My problem is high places, and the Greek myth of Icarus never made much sense to me. I"ve never seen it as much of a cautionary tale. It"s more like a story of the obvious. Forget about the sun melting the wax of his wings. Who cares about his hubris. Of course, Icarus should have spiraled to his death. He tried to soar in the sky. What else could he expect?
But still, near the end of my research for this project, I decided to go skydiving. I had spent more than a year researching issues of social trust, and I wanted to see what I had learned. Are we really that trusting-and trustworthy? Is there a scientific basis for our cooperative ways? Is there a way to rebuild our social fabric? I was also inspired by writers like Jeff Wise, who went skydiving for science for his engaging book Extreme Fear.1 We know that fight-or-flight chemicals shoot up when people are scared, of course. But what would happen to oxytocin? Would intense fear also cause the trust hormone to shoot up? It shouldn"t. Fear is an ego-driven emotion, and when the stress hormone cortisol rockets through our bodies at full blast, the limbic system takes over. Pain feels distant. Muscles tighten. Blood vessels expand. Thoughts become narrow and focused, and when psychologists give cognitive tests before high-stress events, people are often unable to answer a basic question like what"s three plus nine. To put it differently, fight-or-flight isn"t just a response system. It can become an autopilot system that takes over our bodies.
Zak knew this as well as anyone, and in studies, he"s found that when people have high levels of cortisol, they tend to act more selfishly. In economic games, they"re not as trusting or as trustworthy.2 During stressful events, testosterone levels also often spike, and the male hormone has a different effect than cortisol. Testosterone builds strong muscles and thick beards. It encourages risk taking and makes people less trustworthy. Basically, it"s what makes people act like they"re aggressive, ent.i.tled teenagers. In another experiment, Zak asked subjects to write down what they believed an "acceptable" offer would be from a partner in an economic game, and with a shot of testosterone, the subjects would reject their own offer around 10 percent of the time. With a placebo, it was just 3 percent.
Still, Zak believes that our oxytocin-based bonding system remains strong even in the most heart-thumping moments, so when a graduate student mentioned skydiving as a way to test his theory, Zak thought: Great idea. Zak had already done two experiments on himself, and each time, he sampled his blood before and after he went skydiving. The results were hardly scientific. These were ill.u.s.trative examples.
But the data were suggestive. Zak"s cortisol levels skyrocketed, and on the first dive, the stress hormone jumped 400 percent. More surprisingly, Zak"s oxytocin levels also ticked upward, increasing more than 40 percent. "It"s remarkable that the oxytocin system works in this sort of situation," Zak told me. "I mean, think about it. You"re literally scared for your life."
In the weeks before the jump, I thought a lot about Zak"s "scared for your life" comment. Way too much, actually. Low-level panic attacks would strike without warning. In the middle of the afternoon, sitting in my office, I"d imagine myself jumping out of the airplane, and my chest would grow empty. My hands would tremble. I"d start to cough and choke. Over time, I became convinced that when it came to oxytocin, Zak must have been an outlier. Why would your body release a social hormone if you were convinced that you were about to die?
My fears grew worse, and the night before the jump, I had friends witness the signing of my will. I took a horse-sized dose of Ambien but still couldn"t sleep. My body was nervous and twitchy, and by the time I arrived at the skydiving center the next day and met up with Zak, it felt like panic had short-circuited my brain. I couldn"t seem to make any sort of decision. Would I need sungla.s.ses? Should I bring a snack? Did I need to go to the bathroom one more time? My brain couldn"t quite get a fix on the answers.
Then, much sooner-and much later-than I had hoped, Zak had drawn my blood, and I was shaking hands with my skydiving instructor, Christiaan Rendle. He was broad-shouldered and ponytailed, and I pestered him with one query after another. How often have you been skydiving? Ever had any problems? Did you pack our parachute? It turned out that Rendle was one of the most experienced instructors at the skydiving center. He had done some fourteen thousand jumps and had served as a stunt double in movies and TV commercials. As for the parachute, he didn"t pack it himself, and yes, there was a second parachute in case the first one didn"t work.
Rendle hustled me into the plane along with Zak and his skydiving instructor, and what happened next is a jumbled sequence of vivid snapshots. The hawkish profile of the pilot"s face. Another skydiving instructor telling some corny jokes. Rendle snapping me into what was essentially an adult-sized baby carrier.
In the plane, Zak sat a few feet away from me. "You all right, Ulrich?"
A dull pain roiled my stomach. Sweat coated my palms. Someone had already jumped from the plane, but the thundering noise made it too loud to hear any of his screams. It seemed like the sky had just swallowed him alive.
"Yup, I"m good!" I yelled back.
Then, endless minutes later, Zak and his skydiving instructor belly-flopped out of the plane. And then, slowly, like some sort of barely working stop-motion movie, step by slow step, foot by slow foot, Rendle and I hobbled to the open door. I was swaddled by then, and Rendle more or less had to shove me out into the sky.
"Holy f.u.c.king s.h.i.t! Holy f.u.c.king s.h.i.t!" I kept screaming at 120 miles per hour, my body stretched out like a kite. In midair, as I was plunging downward in a screaming, explosive rush, Rendle tapped me, reminding me to release my grip on my harness, and then without warning, after a long velocity-filled high, it was over, and the parachute opened up above us like a giant nylon cloud.
As we floated to the ground, I quickly re-realized my fear of heights, my deep hatred of being off the ground, and eventually I landed on a gra.s.sy field. Zak quickly escorted me back to skydiving center, where he would take my blood. I knew, of course, that I had trusted Rendle that afternoon. But would my oxytocin levels go up? I wasn"t sure, or as Zak told me, "You looked like a robot up there."
Zak turned out to be half right, and before the jump, my oxytocin was at bottom-of-the-test-tube levels. It seemed as if there was barely a peptide of the trust hormone floating around in my blood. But after the leap, my oxytocin levels had leapt upward by 193 percent. "Huge trust response," Zak explained. I looked at the results for my other hormones. They had increased, but not nearly as much as oxytocin. My testosterone levels were up 8 percent. Cortisol levels increased 9 percent.
At first I thought that I must have experienced some sort of special oxytocin high. Why else would my oxytocin levels have increased so much? But Zak explained that my cortisol levels would have gone up higher if they hadn"t been so sky-high to start off with. "Your ACTH baseline was through the roof," he explained. "Same with your testosterone. You were so pumped up for the jump that there was little your body could do to get you more amped up during the free fall."
Given what we know about stress, it"s obvious why my cortisol and testosterone levels increased. But it"s not at all clear what might have prompted oxytocin release. When I reached out to neuroscientist Larry Young, he told me that the cause may have been dopamine. "Perhaps the excitement of skydiving stimulated oxytocin release, which then could make the social cues of whoever you are with more salient," Young wrote in an email. "Perhaps when a couple of guys fight off and kill a lion, they feel the exhilaration but also develop a bond."
I also contacted Sue Carter, who had done the groundbreaking research on prairie voles, and she argued that oxytocin can provide a type of emotional buffer for stress. "Oxytocin helps with coping," Carter explained. The final thing to consider is something far simpler. My oxytocin levels were so low before the jump that the hormone probably had only one way to go: upward.
Zak is not sure what the results mean either. There were too many variables. This wasn"t a science experiment; it was an anecdote. Zak"s current theory-and it"s very much a theory-is that even in these extreme I"m-going-to-die moments, we want to connect with others. We want to develop a bond. It"s not that we want others to help us, though clearly that"s part of it. Rather, our attachment circuits are creating a meaningful partnership. They"re developing a learned sense of: This person saved my life, and so I want to be around him. I want to help him. And when I return the favor, it will feel good. "My guess is that the first thing in your mind when the parachute pulled open was: "I love this guy so much,"" Zak told me.
As evidence, Zak pointed to the fact that people often have very clear memories of their skydiving instructors, and certainly I could easily recall Rendle"s narrow eyes, brown ponytail, and easy demeanor. "If you see your skydiving instructor on the street five years from now, I guarantee you that you"ll recognize him. His face will be imprinted on your brain. You"ve bonded with him. You see him as a friend," Zak told me. "As far as your mind goes, he saved your life. But I don"t think he"ll remember you. I mean, he does jumps with dozens of different people every day."
The data suggest that the brain"s bonding system works even in the most stressful of stressful situations, although that still needs to be confirmed. "A two hundred percent increase in oxytocin is extraordinarily rare in all the experiments we"ve run, and you had it under such high levels of stress and testosterone," Zak told me. "It really tells you that we have a powerful kind of survival system around connection and oxytocin, and if we want to understand human nature, human society, this is a big part of the story."
For Zak, the point is that even when we"re supposed to be at our most selfish, even when our lives are on the line, we"re built to connect. For centuries we"ve referred to our species as h.o.m.o sapiens, which comes from the Latin for "wise man," but I think we"ve been wrong. Our cooperative ways, our social side, has often mattered far more for the success of our species than our "wisdom," and we might be better off thinking of ourselves as h.o.m.o confido, or "trusting man." That, it seems, is a more accurate description of who we are.
Daredevil Felix Baumgartner once argued that when people go skydiving, they get a sense of the immensity of the world.3 But Baumgartner got it only half right. Because when you jump out of a plane attached to someone else, you also learn about the immensity of our faith in others, and it turns out that skydiving serves as a metaphor for how we might create a more trusting-and trustworthy-society.
The first lesson? We need to do more to consider the perspectives of others. When I first met my skydiving instructor, Christiaan Rendle, he told me that he had a sense of what I was going through. He didn"t joke about it. He didn"t make me feel spineless or simpleminded. "For a lot of people this is probably one of the most adventurous things they"ll ever do," Rendle told me. "They might spend six months planning it, thinking about it, building it up. I always try and remind myself that this is a big deal for people." In other words, even after having done more than fourteen thousand jumps, Rendle tries to show some sympathy for first-timers.
When it comes to trust, building faith in friends and family is often relatively easy. What"s harder-and, frankly, far more important-is building faith in people outside of your group. Almost every expert in social ties-from Paul Zak to Robert Putnam to Frans de Waal-highlights the importance of this issue, and indeed, it"s at the very center of social trust. Or better yet, ask yourself: Do I interact with people who look different from me? Do I engage with people who have diverse political views? Do I spend time with people who make more or less money than I do?
In this sense, journalist Robert Wright had it right when he recently argued that one of the nation"s most pressing issues was the fact that people don"t look at problems "from the point of view of other people."4 As Wright suggests, this means that if you"re a gun owner, you might need to understand that not everyone shares your pa.s.sion for a.s.sault rifles. And if you"re not a gun owner, it means realizing that people who buy guns often see their weapons as a civil right.
The second lesson is that trust is ultimately a choice. Before I jumped out of the plane at Skydive Elsinore, I had to take a short cla.s.s and watch a training video. The instructor reviewed all the key lessons with me as well. I knew exactly what I was getting into. This helps explain why schooling often leads to higher levels of social trust; with more education, we"re more understanding. This idea also goes back to the story of subway driver Hector Ramirez. We want people to have their own sense of right and wrong. We want people to have a feeling of autonomy. As a society, we don"t want to force trust. We want to grow trust.
The third lesson is one that football coach Bill Walsh might have expressed best: "Success belongs to everyone." Or consider this anecdote: Shortly before Rendle and I stepped into the plane, I joked that it should be easy for me to trust him. After all, if Rendle made a mistake, we would both plummet to our deaths. But Rendle quickly corrected me, pointing out that we needed to work together. If I didn"t arch my back, the two of us could flip over in midair and potentially have a dangerous landing. He made it clear that we were in the jump together, that we needed to work as partners.
And finally there"s this fact: No one wants to jump out of a plane with a hole in his parachute, and when we think about trust, we also need to think about trustworthiness. At the micro level, we need to focus on ourselves. If we want the faith of others, we need to ask: Am I honest? Am I dependable? Do I deliver results? For individuals, the trust-building process doesn"t so much begin with faith. It begins with reliability and performance, and we often overestimate how much others believe that we are trustworthy.5 At the macro level, the questions around trustworthiness are similar. Do our inst.i.tutions inspire trust by being productive, transparent, and accountable? Does our society promote justice and equality? Does our economy ensure that everyone gains? There"s no doubt that many of our inst.i.tutions could do better. Within government, agencies will sometimes fail to track performance and show that they are, in fact, responsible and outcome-oriented. Our justice system doesn"t do nearly enough to build a sense of shared values either, and too often individuals view our legal system as unfair-and illegitimate.
Or just consider our nation"s ever-growing levels of inequality. Because of the yawning gap between the rich and poor, we"re less likely to trust-and less optimistic about our future.6 In a way, we"re coming across an idea that we"ve already seen: When it comes to our faith in others, trustworthiness is the difference between trusting well and trusting poorly. And we need to do more to build this sort of trustworthiness-and this sort of trust. That means stronger communities. That means a deeper social fabric. That means understanding that trust is ultimately a risk-one that might not always pay off. But above all, it"s time to leap.
Acknowledgments.
While I worked on this project, I often wondered why anyone would write a book on trust. Could I have chosen a broader, more ill-defined subject? Maybe a book on love? War? The history of civilization? More to the point, there were lots of times when I doubted myself, when I relied on others to get me through. Above all, then, an unending thank-you to my wife, Nora. Without your love and support, I"d still be rewriting the first page. My daughters, Leila and Sonja, made me realize that trust is a type of love, and my faith in you will always endure. Since I was a kid, my parents have never stopped encouraging me. Dad, your creativity still inspires. Mom, I"m still waiting for cookbook number two. My brother and sister were a wonderful help, too. Markus, to quote your feedback: "Tumescent twinge = hard-on? Why tell at all?" And, Katharina, who knew that Simon Baron-Cohen was so hard to reach? Oh, Rachel and Bryan: The circle of trust extends to you, too. Next time I"ll be filling up your inbox with a draft ma.n.u.script.
My profound grat.i.tude goes to Carly Hoffmann. Your attention to detail, your enduring support, thank you; and, no, I don"t know why the Alaskans are so trusting. Gillian McKenzie is a literary agent with vision and grit. She contributed hugely to this book, or as she wrote once in an email, "The Leap is catchy!" To David Moldawer: Thanks for seeing the promise in a rough idea. I hope we get to work together on a project soon. To Katie Salisbury: Your advice has been spot-on, down to the recommendation about me smiling in my author photo. Thank you for pushing this project over the finish line. And to my copyeditor, Douglas Johnson, an endless thank you.
At the Center for American Progress, I had a deeply supportive group of colleagues, including Kristina Costa, Gadi Dechter, John Podesta, Reece Rushing, and Neera Tanden. Without the inspiration of the Doing What Works project, I would have never embarked on this project. A special thanks to Cindy Brown, who gave me the time off to work on this book. Oh, and I hope you don"t find a typo. And then there"s the brilliant Carl Chancellor, whose wonderful editorial help got me over the finish line.